Gift of learning: Donation gives student new life'

By
Eric Bonzar, The Morning Journal

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Entering junior high school can be an overwhelming experience for any student.
For 13-year-old Nathan Gezzer, his first few weeks as a seventh-grader at Amherst Junior High School were exceptionally difficult for both him and Multi-Exceptionalities educator Jill Galloway.
As a result of a traumatic brain injury suffered in 2004, Nathan was left with the loss of vision in his left eye because of a pale optic nerve and about 20/70 vision in his right eye — which has been progressively getting better through the years, his mother Colleen Wilson said.
By using magnifiers and scanners at the beginning of the school year, Nathan would download his work onto a computer to help him read text clearer.
Galloway used the items to help Nathan complete his work, but nothing allowed them to gain a true assessment of where his strengths and weaknesses were when it came to learning.
Galloway said she and Maureen Bruder, an intervention specialist, struggled to find a way to help Nathan learn and find a true assessment of his abilities.
“It didn’t make any sense to me,” Galloway said.
The devices used became cumbersome, the teaching methods were ineffective and frustration mounted for both pupil and teacher.
“He had a lot of gizmos,” Galloway said. “But nothing was working to help him get the answers correct.”
It would be “a long three weeks” into the school year, Galloway said, before she and Bruder received a gift that would not only improve their ability to teach Nathan, but also would dramatically improve his grades.
“I have something with Nathan’s name written all over it,” Bruder told Galloway.
That gift was a closed-circuit television (CCTV) donated to the school by Karen Pittak and her family.
Much like Nathan, Pittak’s father, Daniel J. Zgola, struggled with loss of sight for many years and the closed-circuit television allowed him to see.
Pittak said “through his macular degeneration and sight loss, new life is passed on” to Nathan through the use of the machine.
“It fits,” Galloway said. “It’s exactly what we needed to help Nathan learn.”
By simply turning a dial, Nathan can enlarge fonts and images while maintaining the focus which he wasn’t able to accomplish before.
In the past, Galloway said she would enlarge images on a printer causing them to distort and become illegible. Now images can be magnified almost 10 times its original size and maintain the clarity and detail. It’s a “critical” improvement, Galloway, said when it comes to teaching monetary values of coinage.
“He couldn’t do that before,” she said.

The improvement
“Is it a quarter?” Nathan asks as he touches an image of the 25-cent piece on the monitor.
Galloway said “touch point” instruction is utilized to teach differences between coins and solve mathematical problems. Depending on the value, a certain number of touch points are drawn onto the coin and are mathematically added to determine its value.
Selection of background colors ranging from paper white to purple allows Nathan to choose one that best helps him focus on the screen images.
Switching the background color from white to something denser, the text becomes clearer and easier to read, as white tends to distort fonts for those who are visually impaired.
“Can you do my blue?” Nathan asks Galloway as she cycles through the color options. “It’s my favorite.”
Prior to receiving the CCTV, Galloway said Nathan was struggling with spelling and spending nearly 45 minutes working on math problems because he had trouble seeing the numbers.
Now, learning has become a snap for Nathan, evident as he continuously clicks the middle and index fingers of his right hand together — a new talent he recently acquired through the help of his classmates.
Nathan’s test scores have dramatically improved in a short period of time and he has cut his time spent on math down by two-thirds — finishing it in the 15 minutes that Galloway has allotted.
“He earned a 100 percent on his first spelling test after receiving (the CCTV),” Wilson boasted proudly in a recent Facebook post. “Before Nathan was using all of his energy to see something. Now he’s using his energy to do the work. Now I know what he knows and doesn’t know.
“Nathan is a visual learner. Before he couldn’t see things. Being able to see things clearly have dramatically improved his learning ability.”
The machine also has allowed him to interact with his classmates during reading times, something he wasn’t able to do effectively.
“It lets me buddy read,” Nathan said.
Thanks to the Pittak family and Zgola, Nathan can communicate and share what he knows with his fellow classmates.
“That’s why this is such a gift,” Galloway said. “We can communicate now. That’s really a blessing for him.”
“We’re buddies,” Nathan added as he gave Galloway a hug.